At the end of 2016, there was a major attack against San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency. The attack was done using Mamba ransomware. This month, we noted that the group behind this ransomware has resumed their attacks against corporations.

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In early 2017, Kaspersky Lab’s researchers have discovered an emerging and dangerous trend: more and more cybercriminals are turning their attention from attacks against private users to targeted ransomware attacks against businesses.

Friday May 12th marked the start of the dizzying madness that has been ‘WannaCry’, the largest ransomware infection in history. Defenders have been running around trying to understand the malware’s capabilities. In the process, a lot of wires have gotten crossed and we figured it’s time to sit down and set the record straight on what we know, what we wish we knew, and what the near future might hold for us going forward.

Earlier today, our products detected and successfully blocked a large number of ransomware attacks around the world. In these attacks, data is encrypted with the extension “.WCRY” added to the filenames. Our analysis indicates the attack, dubbed “WannaCry”, is initiated through an SMBv2 remote code execution in Microsoft Windows.

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Ransomware’s popularity has attracted the attention of cybercriminal gangs; they use these malicious programs in targeted attacks on large organizations in order to steal money. In late 2016, we detected an increase in the number of attacks, the main goal of which was to launch an encryptor on an organization’s network nodes and servers.

This year we found a new family of ransomware used in targeted attacks against organizations. After penetrating an organization’s network the threat actors used the PsExec tool to install ransomware on all endpoints and servers in the organization. The next interesting fact about this ransomware is that the threat actors decided to use the well-known Petya ransomware to encrypt user data.

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Many mobile bankers can block a device in order to extort money from its user. But we have discovered a modification of the mobile banking Trojan Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Faketoken that went even further – it can encrypt user data. In addition to that, this modification is attacking more than 2,000 financial apps around the world.

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Confidential data can be protected by encrypting traffic at wireless access points. In fact, this method of protection is now considered essential for all Wi-Fi networks. But what actually happens in practice?

A few days ago, Patrick Wardle published an analysis of a new Backdoor and Dropper used by HackingTeam. It looks like the samples mentioned in the blog were found in-the-wild, so we decided to see how this latest Backdoor works.

Many readers have asked for a primer summarizing the privacy and security issues at stake in the the dispute between Apple and the U.S. Justice Department, which last week convinced a judge in California to order Apple to unlock an iPhone used by one of assailants in the recent San Bernardino massacres. I don’t have much original reporting to contribute on this important debate, but I’m visiting it here because it’s a complex topic that deserves the broadest possible public scrutiny.